"The Truth About Belonging..."

Gay Couples Finally Get Their Prom Night
For many older same-sex couples, the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center's senior citizen prom is the one they couldn't have when they were younger.


Hailey Branson-Potts
July 5, 2013

For his high school prom in 1942, Robert Clement bought a white orchid corsage in a fancy plastic box.

He gave it to a female staff member who organized the dance. Others would think it was a kind gesture, that he was just a considerate young man. In truth, Clement didn't have anyone else to give it to.

He liked boys. And he couldn't take a boy to the prom. Especially not seven decades ago in a small town in Pennsylvania.

"Proms are a rite of passage," Clement said. "A heterosexual rite of passage.... But it wasn't mine."

Last weekend, just one day after gay marriage became legal once more in California, Clement found himself getting dressed up for the prom again — the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center's senior prom.

He's 88 now. He has thinning gray hair and wrinkles around his blue eyes. And a party shirt.

An hour before the prom in Hollywood on Saturday, the soft-spoken World War II veteran changed into "a very fancy shirt — my fake Versace." It was blue and silky, with a gold chariot on the back. A bit of a splurge, he admitted.

Read more here: The Los Angeles Times

*****

I'd love to go to prom... It's something I think about every year during prom season as I see young people dressing up and celebrating life and this rite of passage.  When I was younger, I wondered what it must have been like to celebrate growing up. coming of age and romance. 

Watching my brothers and sisters experience prom and knowing I never would was a painful reminder of how different I was and how lonely I thought my life would be.  In the many years that followed, I learned that I was right... As I lived my life in fear, I was terribly alone and unhappy.  But when finally I found the courage to accept myself, and the freedom to love someone, I found a measure of the happiness that I saw in the faces of my brothers and sisters when they went to prom.  

Perhaps someday, even I'll get to "go to prom."  I'll dance with my husband and in the back of my mind, be transported back all the way to my youth and imagine what it might have been like to know the freedom so many of today's GLBT youth have found.

"Fear Eats the Soul"